Miu Miu / Spring 2012 RTW

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What do you actually do as a designer when you’ve designated yourself to show in last slot, in the last city, to an audience that has been looking at fashion for four weeks on young models who, by now, are so zombie-tired that the makeup seems to be slipping off their faces? Well, you grab the last shreds of their severely depleted attention spans, and sum up the season for them, if you can. That’s exactly what Miuccia Prada did at Miu Miu, the brand that has been such a runaway success, with the forties dresses and glittery shoes for fall 2011. And she did it all—but only by the skin of her teeth.

“I designed it in fifteen days, right after Prada,” she declared. “With Prada, I think so much. But with Miu Miu, it’s improvisation.” What, even the elaborate, leather boots with their Western-turned–folk art patterns tooled with 3-D roses were made in less than two weeks? And the Provençal prints, all patchworked together? Yes, she shrugged, as if that were almost normal.

Well, Mrs. Prada might be uniquely endowed in having the industrial wherewithal to conjure up a collection midway through the shows, but it takes something rather more than financial muscle to amalgamate the season’s ideas in real time and then still make the whole look particularly your own.

At the beginning of the show, admittedly, it looked as if she wasn’t going to get there. Students of Prada (the label) have already dissected the fact that her acclaimed spring 2012 mainline collection was composed of separates made to seem like total matching looks, which is exactly how Miu Miu began, but with the components more clearly set out: high-waisted A-line skirts, bra tops with cropped, off-the-shoulder capes, and the odd fichu-wrap crossing the body and zipping up in back. All this was delivered in black and gray fabric—a recap of notions about mid-century modern tailoring, perhaps. That, and an intriguing stretchy, shirred midsection piece, like a pull-on, pull-up accessory, with which to cinch in a long shirt. So far, so didactically commercial, but then the show gained traction.

What followed looked increasingly like an ode to a petulant film noir ingenue, someone like the dangerous, corrupted characters of Raymond Chandler’s novels. Gradually, she started putting forth lace trapeze dresses and A-line coats in weird, flat colors like gray and burgundy, worn over peculiar patchworks of acid-yellow and burgundy Provençal patterns, and prints involving micro-tile repeats and Chinese lanterns. Amongst all this, the shoes and boots were a riveting mix of Edwardian velvet, cowboy, and ornate embellishment.

Sound confusing? It wasn’t, but if only because this collection (even if allegedly spontaneously thrown together in haste) stands as a vignette about how to blend many trends in simple-to-wear ways. The red-shadowed eyes, greasy locks of hair, and pallid complexions are optional, of course, although that is how most of the hard-core fashion pack happened to look, too, as they flew away at the end of the show toward a well-earned rest.